Will Every Xbox Be a Dev Kit? 69
jfruh writes There were a lot of rumored features of the Xbox One that vanished after public outcry — that it would need an always-on Internet connection, for instance. But another rumor from that era was that every Xbox One sold would include a dev kit that would allow anyone to create games — and it looks like this is one dream that might be coming true soon.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Installable devkits (Score:3)
Every PC running Windows, OS X, or GNU/Linux includes a rudimentary devkit comparable to the BASIC interpreter on early 1980s home microcomputers. It's called the JavaScript interpreter. Copy the following to a new text file called hello.html
And every general-purpose personal computer allows other developer tools to
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The big draw of the OUYA console was its binary compatibility with Android, letting it use well-known tools such as Eclipse and Xamarin. Yet OUYA fizzled for some reason.
Way too many glitches. Saw a keyboard as a game controller, and the keyboard would become controller #1 when the game controller went to sleep. But without a keyboard, life is bad, because you need to type stuff all the time. They kept changing the dashboard without fixing the stuff that was wrong with it. Support for third party controllers was poor, even though that was the whole reason for their controller library to exist. Then google announced that they were going to come up with a gaming hub app and m
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Actually many people were pointing out its numerous issues before its release. Its fanbois just didn't want to believe them.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Installable devkits (Score:4, Insightful)
What the fuck is a div? where did that document.this_function().that_stuff got declared?
How come that this html file works as well :
Hello World
Yea there are probably a lot of crappy tutorials on the internet, but there's no thick paper manual that came with the computer (CBM 64, Apple II, Amstrad CPC..) or a comprehensive help file integrated to the web browser (like in QBASIC) to explain all that crap in a friendly, up to date way.
All I'm seeing is a blank page experience and a hello world.. It's like saying anyone can be a dev and make little games, because there's notepad and the Windows Scripting Host.
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Perhaps that's a symptom of another problem: the shift from printed manuals to manuals on the install media to manuals on the other side of the Internet.
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Every PC running Windows, OS X, or GNU/Linux includes a rudimentary devkit comparable to the BASIC interpreter on early 1980s home microcomputers. It's called the JavaScript interpreter.
Every cell phone and tablet these days, as well.
That and a text editor (Score:2)
Every PC running Windows, OS X, or GNU/Linux includes a rudimentary devkit [...] the JavaScript interpreter.
Every cell phone and tablet these days, as well.
True, but I failed to mention one thing: a text editor in which to create an HTML file in the first place. The mobile operating systems tend not to ship with one.
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Does trying to program on a tablet with a Bluetooth keyboard have the same effect? I ask because some people are trying to use a tablet as a main computer [macstories.net].
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A browser can be a text editor and dev environment (Score:2)
Try this: http://rawgit.com/pdfernhout/P... [rawgit.com]
You can enter the below short JavaScript script in the text box, and then push the "View Below" button to create a new div for the window which will pop up the alert as part of displaying itself.
<script>
alert("hello");
</script>
If you enter a Data ID for the text and a User ID for yourself (can be almost anything) and click "Store" you will store that text in the web browser's local storage.
I wrote that about
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There's always the Uzebox [belogic.com]. It may be a lot less powerful, but it's open source, anyone can code for it and anyone can build one at home at a very low cost.
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The big draw of the OUYA console was its binary compatibility with Android, letting it use well-known tools such as Eclipse and Xamarin. Yet OUYA fizzled for some reason.
"For some reason"? Were you one of those blind fanbois? It's many issues were pointed out all over the place. Penny Arcade pointed out that it was just mostly hype and then all the Ouya fanbois across the Internet got butthurt [giantbomb.com]. Acting as if the failure of Ouya was some freak accident that no one expected, is revisionist history.
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Yet OUYA fizzled for some reason.
Ouya fizzled because it was the answer to a question nobody asked. There are many platforms for independent development that already exist so yet another entry into the lowend was really not going to be successful. Being based on Android was in some ways advantageous but really that was the nail in its coffin, it was easy for developers to just develop an Android game and publish it independently, publish it to Google Play and publish it on the OUYA store so OUYA had no exclusivity, no reason to buy it. It
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Ouya fizzled because it was the answer to a question nobody asked.
The question was "What platform for independent development can easily be connected to a TV?".
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The question was "What platform for independent development can easily be connected to a TV?".
Lots, including the PC. Now obviously the next question is why would you want to connect it to a TV, the answer would be that there are games (like local multiplayer ones with controller support) that people want to play that benefit from it.
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Now obviously the next question is why would you want to connect [a gaming PC] to a TV, the answer would be that there are games (like local multiplayer ones with controller support) that people want to play that benefit from it.
A bunch of Slashdot users over the past several years have been repeatedly telling me that almost nobody is willing to do that. At first, it was because most TVs were CRT SDTVs that could not display PC video without an obscure scan converter box. But once HDMI took off, the big excuses repeated in past comments [slashdot.org] were that the family's PC has integrated graphics, or it's in a separate room from the TV, or just "it's too hard, and consoles are easy [pineight.com]". Instead, I've been told that people interested in developin
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A bunch of Slashdot users over the past several years have been repeatedly telling me that almost nobody is willing to do that.
Of course nobody is willing to do that, there is no advantage or reason to do it. But it is extremely easy to do if some reason to do it came about, like a decent game that required it or was made more enjoyable by it.
You aren't going to get an audience without content.
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You aren't going to get an audience without content.
I agree. But these naysayers have kept telling me that a PC game developer won't get an audience even with content because effectively all the audience for local multiplayer content are console users.
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I agree. But these naysayers have kept telling me that a PC game developer won't get an audience even with content because effectively all the audience for local multiplayer content are console users.
Well obviously you can't just put out the same experience that console users already get. Obviously it needs to be good content that people actually want, yet-another-local-multiplayer-game is not going to win anybody over because you can't disrupt the status quo with an unimaginative "me too" offering. Why buy title X and move my PC into the lounge when I can just play title Y on my console? Well you have to provide that reason.
This is the same reason Ouya failed, all they provided was a platform and were
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Some of the games for the Odyssey2 console -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnavox_Odyssey%C2%B2 - had some (extremely) limited programmability to them. I remember making my own maps on the pac man clone, and programming in their flavor of basic which was different from the basic I knew from the TRS-80 series and hand no real way to save your programs
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A big glaring difference between the C64 of old and the "dev kit" of today is that you have to flip "the switch".
With the C64 the command prompt was also the BASIC interpreter. You could enter the command to load other files into memory, and be on your merry way, or you could start entering BASIC code right there.
You see something similar with *nix shell script.
But with this "dev kit" you have to make the device enter a specific mode. And likely this mode will block you from accessing any of your gaming for
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How could this be? (Score:5, Funny)
Truly, I am living in the goddamn future now...
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I'll sure it'll be crippled.. Like XNA on the 360.
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Xbox 360's Xbox Live Indie Games environment and Windows Phone 7's third-party app environment were crippled to run only C#[1], probably because these platforms lacked a full MMU. The type-safe sandbox was the only security means that the things had, much as in the Singularity research operating system [wikipedia.org]. That might also be part of why Windows Phone 7 devices cannot be upgraded to Windows Phone 8.
[1] The actual restriction was "verifiably type-safe IL that uses the libraries available in the .NET Compact Fram
.NET CF lacks a lot of libraries (Score:2)
Some .NET languages rely on libraries not available in the .NET Compact Framework, and XBLIG and WP7 use the .NET CF. For example, IronPython and other DLR languages do not work in XBLIG or WP7 because it relies on System.Reflection.Emit, which is omitted from .NET CF. Other languages, such as standard C++ in C++/CLI, cannot be compiled without the unsafe switch, and the policies in force on XBLIG and WP7 disallow all unsafe assemblies. Still others might work, but Microsoft would provide no technical suppo
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Hei, cross platform dude. It's only cross platform in a sense that you can run phone apps on a TV and PC. Try to push anything more serious and you end up developing two apps for the price of one. Phone ecosystem in windows phone is nearly non-existant, same for tablets. But don't let that stop you from flashing the "the apps are cross platform now" banner in order to hide, that those platforms will require different approach to interface, energy saving, available power and memory management.
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Don't forget streaming games between xbox and pc, the feature that will finish the steambox. Steam really should create an Xbox client.
Apps... (Score:4, Interesting)
Apps are not games. I get the sneaking feeling that this is just a ruse to get people excited about W10 development. If you're expecting to build your own A/AA/AAA title on XB1 - I'd continue holding your money/breath. This could easily be a repeat of XNA.
Personally, I have no intention of even *touching* an XB1 unless they open-up *native* development. (That means a full directx sdk, kinect, ...the works. None of this .NET second-class-partial access)
Bringing your A game (Score:2, Redundant)
Not every developer new to a particular platform expects to bring their A game from day one. Portal looked like a Nintendo 64 game before it got picked up by Valve [hobbygamedev.com], and Braid looked like a Multimedia Fusion abomination. Sometimes you need a prototype in which you can test gameplay concepts before you can bring skilled artists on board to provide A{1,3} graphical polish. And no, a desktop PC with a bunch of wired Xbox 360/One controllers isn't always the most practical choice, especially if it's a couch mul
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Yeah a lot people really don't understand the importance of a prototype.
Early screenshots [pathofexile.com] of Path of Exile
it's a computer (Score:2)
It will soon be running the same win 10 that my laptop and phone use. I had better be able to make my own games for it.
Microsoft BASIC pre-1984 (Score:4, Insightful)
People were learning to program in Microsoft BASIC interpreters included before 1984. This means before Macintosh (the commercialization of ideas Apple bought from Xerox) and GNU existed. If you've ever keyed something like this into an 8-bit home computer, it was more likely than not in Applesoft on the Apple II or another Microsoft BASIC.
(In the line number era, BASIC string variable namess ended with $.)
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I am not entirely sure I would call making BASIC popular doing something for programming. It took me years to unlearn some of that rubbish...
Microoptimization for microcontrollers (Score:3)
there is no need to squeeze code in a few kilobytes of RAM or hit the metal to get maximum performance.
That was true before MCU kits such as the Arduino became popular.
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Oh man, you should see the bullshit it takes to hook up a YMF262 and YAC512 to an Arduino. It's not just programming the YMF, or even emulating the YAC512 interface (on both ends) so you can pass the audio stream through the ARM core and possibly out to a second Atmel or a DSP for processing or further synthesis (e.g. a SID or YM2612); to hook up any of these chips, you need multiple crystals, piles of capacitors, resistors, and then you need a strategy for matching clock on the interface pins.
I expect a
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So-called "universal apps" aren't really "universal". Instead, they bring dumbed-down HTML+JavaScript crapps to desktops and Xbones. Real programs won't be usable as a "universal app".
Says one more maven who hasn't read the documentation yet...
Every box IS a dev kit (Score:3)
XB1 devkit functionality is in software, not hardware. And part of that is account access to parts of MS Corpnet that allow correct devkit functionality. We have to have the correct authorized user account and sandbox entered for devkit functions to work correctly.
Our devkits at MGS are stock retail kits that are pulled off the line and loaded with in house SDKs.
I have no idea what the plan is, if any, to roll that out widespread. I'm just a polygon slinger.
Talk about burying the lede.. (Score:3)
Sheesh. I'm surprised the original poster didn't point out that Microsoft was found to have abused monopoly power with Internet Explorer in the 90's in Europe in the summary.
Microsoft Bob Returns (Score:1)
Grand Theft Auto - Microsoft Bob Edition
Or, Angry Bobs
they're doing the same thing as Apple (Score:2)
Why does anyone find it surprising?
If you register for a developer program you'll be able to (for a fee) compile and develop apps and sign them for your device. If you want others to be able to run them you'll submit them to MS' store and they'll approve them or not.
And yes, just like for iOS you'll be able to do development and testing on the device.
It's been done before by Apple and by MS (for Windows and Windows Phone). I'm not sure what is the shock that it's going to happen again.
They're going to be Wi
Console makers want experienced developers (Score:2)
Why does anyone find it surprising?
If you register for a developer program
It's surprising because traditionally, not everybody is even allowed to register for the developer program for a major video game console. Console makers have tended to want only established businesses composed of experienced developers [warioworld.com], which means a new studio must start by making games for Windows or (since about 2009) Android. Prior to about 2012, Nintendo also rejected home-based family businesses for lack of a dedicated office. It wasn't quite as surprising when the iPhone introduced third-party appli
"There were a lot of rumored features of the Xbox" (Score:3)
"There were a lot of rumored features of the Xbox One"
They were not rumors, but facts. Microsoft backpedaled on most of them. Short memory span or shill?
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Making games is hard, really hard. Selling on an app-store is hard, really, really hard (ask yourself: how many apps have you bought?).
At least a hundred, maybe more.
As someone who's made games... Making games is not hard, making a good game is time consuming, a little frustrating, occasionally hard and sometimes rewarding. Selling a good game on an app store is easy though.